Not that any Canadian needs 'citations' to know how absolutely without scruples or ethics Harper and his neo-fascist government is, but for the non-Canadians here's an informative link:
"Firstly, the user will download the image data even if it isn't used on the page, an external image is only downloaded if it's element is present & visible."
If you are strategic and smart about when you include certain CSS rules, this is less of a problem. The images in these files should be user interface chrome shared by the majority of your app/site. Other inline images should be split across section-based CSS files (if your site is not a single page JS app).
"Secondly & more importantly, browsers completely block rendering while CSS downloads (with the exception of Opera, which unblocks after about 3 seconds), CSS does not render progressively."
Except with at 500k sprite file (very common) your user waits for UI elements to pop-in that depend on it. So yes it doesn't block, but the UI can look strange. You end up with a bunch of blank spots or incomplete backgrounds while this sucker loads. Also if you dynamically add elements to the page that make requests for uncached sprite images (because you are being smart and don't want a 500k sprite file) you have to wait for those UI elements to load in their images. With data-uris the image data is already there, ready to use.
"Neither sprites or data uris are the "correct solution" in all situations, it should be considered on a case by case basis."
Agreed, but I will typically bias myself toward data uris to avoid the extra network request(s) and the pain-in-the-ass maintenance of sprite files (especially when shared across a team).
Really, what we should be doing is using fewer images in our UIs.
Am I the only one that feels discouraged that Java still maintains this level of popularity? I thought Google's primary language was Python, why isn't that running on Android?
Good. IE 6-8 need to die a quick death and this is a way to help them along. It would be even better if devs got together and just dumped IE6-8 users to an incompatibility page.
This fix is as ancient as the stars. To deal with <=IE7, simply add the MS propietary zoom: 1. Overflow:hidden is not recommended, because, well it makes things hidden. Also, everyone stop floating everything left to "clear" your floats, it's driving me crazy.
No, simply no. GWT is everything we should be running screaming from, and yes because its Java and yes because it lets programmers be lazy and not go out of their comfort zone and fucking learning JavaScript